Photocredit: The Hindu Denying basic amenities to residents of ‘unrecognised’ slums is an affront to their dignity; resettling them fails to address their concerns and is unviable financially. Since 2005, the Central government has given significant amounts of money to … Read More
Impact of Access to Finance: Network Level Effects
Access to finance can have multiple effects on an individual’s life, especially on community behavior. Imagine that we had no banks, no financial services – Who would we borrow from? The rent that informal service providers can extract from their … Read More
KGFS Harvest Diary: Lessons From the Field
We continue our feature of the KGFS Impact Evaluation and follow from our previous post, which mentioned how KGFS researchers are customizing a harvest diary suited to the needs of the project. In the last post on Designing a Harvest … Read More
Designing a Harvest Diary
We continue our feature of the KGFS study and follow from our previous post, which mentioned how KGFS researchers are tackling problems with collecting self-reported agricultural data by using a harvest diary. The greatest challenge we faced was in designing a … Read More
The Challenges in Collecting Self-Reported Agricultural Data
Some of the greatest challenges that we encounter as researchers involved in primary data collection lie in tackling inherent biases in self-reported data such as respondent bias, enumerator bias, and recall bias. This blog series deals with one of the … Read More
Strands of Data – Understanding the Impact of Financial Access on Stress
On discussing the impact of financial access, I can think of few questions more important than whether and how financial access affects stress. Does a life insurance policy let you sleep easier, knowing that if your husband dies, at least … Read More
Procedures and Suggestions for Field-based Surveying
Field-based survey work requires a scientific approach, with several activities and procedures taking course simultaneously. In this post, we’re going to try to define the several phases which take place during field work and try to define procedures for improving … Read More
Mid-Day Meals in India
42% of Indian children under age five are underweight[1] – double the rate of sub-Saharan Africa. India is also home to 1 in every 3 malnourished child in the world. Last January, Manmohan Singh, while addressing the country, said that … Read More
Milking Savings Accounts: Cash, Cows and a Lack of Financial Intermediaries
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion and a heated debate (see here, here and here) on the relative effectiveness of providing cash transfers versus offering more traditional, in-kind or conditional transfers – such as grants of livestock—as a … Read More
The Risks Posed to our Surveyors
During a survey operation, we conduct various surveys with our study participants, such as Household surveys, Vendor surveys, Market surveys and so on. Something we don’t think about however is that while surveying, the field staff, especially the surveyors take various … Read More